I listen to a lot of podcasts but I realised they were all exclusively focused on Windows and .NET development. I decided to look further a field and discovered this absolute gem - Software Engineering Radio. There are 151 shows to choose from and TBH, I feel like I just won the lottery (ok – not really).

The breadth is fantastic. Java, Ruby, .NET, patterns, performance, uml, security, case studies (eBay for instance) and with some fantastic speakers such as Ted Neward, Bob Martin and Kevlin Henney (although I only recognise folks with at least one foot in the .NET camp).

I definitely recommend you add it to your lists of podcasts – oh, and while you are at it, you may as well add my humble podcast as well (RSS or Itunes) :-)

2 years behind?

For fun I decided to go back to an episode from 2006 - Episode 15: The Future of Enterprise Java. I thought it would be interesting to compare a “future” podcast with what really happened over the last 3 years. However what struck me was that this episode was playing out a conversation that Java folks were having in May 2006 which in the .NET world we seem to have only really got into in late 2008. That is a lag of 2 years.

The episode covers off the relationship between Enterprise Java and upcoming technologies such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, lightweight web frameworks such as Spring, open source ORM frameworks such as Hibernate.

Sound familiar?

To be clear, I am not saying the .NET technology is 2 years behind Java, far from it. But as a community of developers we are lagging – which I knew, but this show underlined it!